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Daily Archives: 1 Dec 2004

—Subjects > News > Colleges and Universities (Alexa) The web indexing service Alexa rates my academic site (jerz.setonhill.edu) as the fifth most popular in the “News > Colleges and Universities” category. Then again, there are only five sites in that category… so “Alexa puts my site in last place” is another way of looking at the data. I remember the story about the Russian news service that supposedly reported “Soviet car…

Three major network television stations – NBC, CBS and ABC – have provided news and entertainment to American television viewers for decades. Each network broadcasts the evening news at 6:30 p.m., and for many American families, gathering around the television set to watch NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, CBS anchor Dan Rather, or ABC anchor Peter Jennings has become a tradition. But some media experts say that era may be coming…

“Troops crossed the line of departure,” 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. “It’s going to be a long night.” CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun. In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert’s carefully…

A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use. “I think it was the word of last year rather than this year,” he said. “Now we’re getting words that derive from it such as ‘blogosphere’ and so on,” he said. “But,” he added, “it’s a pretty recent thing and in the way that…

In justifying this nightmare society [Orwell’s 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People are immensely malleable, more so, in all likelihood, than any other species. But infinitely? Absolutely…